Working across large-scale drawing, painting, glazed stoneware, performance and printed intervention, Melina Merlin places the Queer brown female figure at the centre of histories built to exclude her. Her own Chicana body is the point of departure. Born in San Francisco and based in London, Merlin works from situated knowledge: the understanding that every account of history is made from somewhere, by someone–and the canon’s claim to neutrality is itself a position. Indigenous feminist methodologies govern the practice, binding the artist in accountability to the women she depicts.
Drawing is Merlin’s primary mode of thinking, and she practises it as an embodied act. At the scale of the body, the drawing registers reach, weight and movement as much as image. The line does double work: the charcoal that renders a figure also renders the fence behind it, and the mark that describes a body also marks a border. Her monumental works on paper and linen retitle art history in women’s favour: Venus comes before Botticelli, Guadalupe before Jesus. Where the drawings claim space on the wall, the Slip Interventions work by stealth. Printed inserts slipped into canonical texts, among them Gombrich’s The Story of Art, place omitted women inside the very pages that left them out. In clay, the approach turns elemental. The seventy-plus glazed stoneware works of Myths of Xochimilco treat earth and water as an archive of diaspora and return, holding memory through touch, weight and time.
Merlin’s practice-led doctoral research at Goldsmiths, University of London, Drawing a Chicana Line: Situated Knowledge and Embodied Return, centres on the Huastecan Female BallPlayer, an Indigenous Mexican sculpture of a woman athlete, and the institutional misreadings that have shaped her. A lifelong football player, Merlin approaches the sculpture through the body as much as the archive, setting what the museum record omits against lived knowledge of the game. Her earlier career in law and social justice informs a practice that treats art history as a body of evidence open to cross-examination.
Most Recent Exhibitions,
Rhymes with Dice, Solo Exhibition, Holy Trinity, at Florence Trust, August 2026, London
FT: 1-1, 08/08, 08:00am – 08:00pm, August 2026, Holy Trinity, Florence Trust, London
Florence Trust, Artist in Residence, Group Exhibition: July 2026, 35 Britannia Row, London